Goodbye Moorea...

Goodbye Moorea, and goodbye flash on the camera! After few different shots of us sitting on that coach, the gorilla pod lost its balance and grip on the opposite chair that the gorilla pod was gripping, the camera fell backward dropped onto the marble floor. The flash broke instantly. :(

I kept the page simple. I asked Tommy to participate in this layout as well. I decided to use a beige color cardstock as my background.

I decided to use 1 photo only for my layout. Because the hotel lobby was very opened, bright and green, I decided to stick with a theme in this layout with similar color to the picture. I found a pattern green & white paper. I decided to use it to cut the font from my Silhouette Digital Cutter. After cutting it out and removing the letters from the carrier sheet, I noticed that the fonts was too light if I decided to adhere them onto the cardstock. I decided to cut another set of the letters with brown cardstock to make the other pattern stand out on the page.

I decided to create use my digital cutter to cut out the photo corners. I used a different green pattern paper to cut out the corners. To keep it uniformed, I also cut out another set of photo corners to put behind the pattern paper.

I adhered the picture over the photo corner.




I asked Tommy to write about his Moorea experience. He kept his journal short, partially because he forgot most about his trip, other than how excited he was, looking forward to Bora Bora that day!






As for me, I also wrote a journal. I managed to squeeze so much in with so little space provided for myself. I retained a lot of detailed information in my mind (I called them... unnecessary information!) I usually write small, but I think I wrote even smaller in this.

I decided to cut 2 pieces of green cardstock to adhere behind the 2 journals. I had some small blue flowers and decided to use them. I added rhinestones the flowers to give a little bling to my page.

That's it for Moorea! Follow my travel blog on my travel experience!

Dinner @ Mahana'i

For the entire 4 nights stay in Moorea, Tommy ate at the resort for dinner, other than the dinner & show on our first night. Mahana'i is the main restaurant at the Moorea Pearl. I had scraped quite a bit of food pages in my Tahiti scrapbook. I probably had scraped at least 3 different layouts of my dining experience at Mahana'i. We dined there for 2 nights.

Tommy and I love to try a bit of everything, when possible. We made sure for all our dinners, we would not order the same thing on the menu so we could try different plates. We also made sure that we would not order the same thing as the other night we dined there.

This page was quite special to me because Tommy helped out in creating this double layout with me. He was recovering a minor surgery at his home. I wanted to spend more time with him and wanted to help him put his mind off the pain, so I decided to work on a layout together - from brainstorming how we wanted the page to look to the color coordination.

Although this is probably not the best page out of the entire Tahiti scrapbook, it's nice that Tommy was involved in it to help me out. After this page, I am pretty sure he won't be helping me much.

We decided to do a double page layout. One side consisted of the order that Tommy ordered, and the other side consisted of the order I ordered. We also wrote a little journal about our dining experience.


We decided to choose brown cardstock as our background of our double layout. The reason why we wanted to use the brown cardstock was because we wanted to resemble the background as the color of the table that we sat at.

We chose a silver metallic cardstock because there was a place mat on the table where we dined. The place mat was shimmery, metallic. The design of the place mat had a checkered design with 2 different colors -- brown/gold with green/silvery tone.

I used my silhouette cutter to cut out the letters. We decided to use black as the font on the left side of the layout.

To keep it a bit more interesting, Tommy wanted to use a yellow star epoxy sticker to replace the dot on the letter "i."

We arranged the pictures from top to bottom (appetizer- dinner- dessert). We also resized all 6 pictures .


With the way how we arranged the pictures on one side, it gave us enough space in the middle to write a small journal. I tripled layered the journal. I started with a black cardstock, which I used the round corner punch to punch out the 2 corners. Then, I layered a greenish metallic cardstock over the black cardstock.

I had Tommy wrote his experience on a small cardstock. After he was done, I layered his journal on top of the green metallic cardstock. I used a gold color brad as decoration.

The second side of the layout was basically the same as the one on the left. I put the pictures the same way like the other side, expect "mirrored."

I used a green metallic cardstock to cut out the font from my digital cutter.

The "@" sign, I actually it 2 times with the 2 different cardstock. Originally, I wanted to cut the "@" sign down the middle and adhere right at the edge of the page with 2 colors.

Tommy talked me out of it and decided that it would look better if we use the black font instead and adhere it completely onto one side of the page. Again, he decided to use epoxy sticker at the end.

Just like the other side, I wrote my dining experience. I tried to keep the two pages identical in design. It looked like a mirror reflection.

4x4 Safari Tour - Page 2

The thing about this scrapbook, I knew exactly what layouts I wanted to do. I would use a post it note and stick it on the album to remind myself of the events/ activities that I wanted to scrap about. I decided to create a collage of Tommy and me on the Safari Tour.



I decided to go with the green cardstock as background. It is the same background used for the layout next to it - 4x4 Safari Tour. I also used the same 2 pattern papers to create this page. I decided to tear the papers. In the center of the layout, I wrote down all the stops we had during the tour. I used 4 brads for each corner to make the center look like a "board."

Next week, if time permits, I will post another page. I am going on a vacation, and I need to start planning my trip and start thinking what to pack. :)

A Good Day...

A Good Day starts with a Good Breakfast! At the Moorea Pearl Resort & Spa, our breakfast was complimentary. There's a good variety of food at the buffet every morning. However, they serve the same thing daily. What I loved the most there was the pineapple juice! That was the only juice I drank every morning. It was sweet and it was really yummy! I hope to see Moorea pineapple juice distributes here soon!

I decided to create a layout for our daily breakfast. I picked a dark brown cardstock as background and used tiki pattern cardstock to layer it over the brown cardstock. I kept the page simple. I used one picture and wrote a long journal.

I decided to give a catchy title. I remembered one of the waitresses told us that it is a good day when we start with a good breakfast. I decided to quote her statement and used it as a title for my layout.

I cut the fonts with my digital cutter with white cardstock. I used a brown ink chalk to chalk the letter to resemble the sands on the beach.

I also purchased corner edges from Silhouette. I used the Silhouette digital cutter to cut the 4 photo corners. Again, I chose to use ink chalk to chalk the edges of the photo corners. Afterwards, I used the runner tapes to tape the photo corners directly onto the four corners of the picture.

I decided to write a journal about my breakfast experience while we were in Moorea. I wrote about the food we had at breakfast, what I liked and what I didn't like (omelets!) I am not a big fan of omelets, but after this trip, I can not eat omelets. I can only have 2 bites of it, and I am done. I am not allergic to any of the ingredients in the omelets. I have no problem eating them separately. Once they are put together, I have a problem with the aroma of the omelets. My mind and body just shuts down.

As for the journal, I also used the ink chalk to chalk around all the edges. I accidentally inked a spot in the middle of the journal! To cover up the mistake, I decided to use the ink chalk creatively by lightly pressing the ink chalk randomly on the paper to hide the mistake. That became a different look and I thought it was kinda nice.

Beach Day

The color of the page had to be adjusted as it came out too dark! :(

Our beautiful resort has a beach on its property! We didn't even have to walk out of the property to see the beach. After breakfast on Sunday, May 24, 2009, we took a stroll and walk down to the beach. The day was beautiful, the sun was warm and the water was at room temperature! We decided that we would spend the day at the resort to hang out, relax and do absolutely nothing. Well, not exactly did nothing, we kayaked, snorkeled, ate, all the fun activities that the resort had offered for us.

I decided to do a single layout for this page. I used a light brown cardstock as a background. I used brown ink chalk to chalk the sides of the paper. It made the paper stood out. I kept the layout simple. I used only one picture for this layout.

I cut the letters out with my digital cutter. I cut out 2 sets of the same letters with 2 different sheets of paper. I picked blue and a sand patterned paper. I kept the blue letters as the base and cut the sand patterned letters in half with a wave effect. I kept the top half of the letters and overlaid it over the blue.

I used the brown ink chalk to chalk around the top part of the letters.



I cut out a square of from a blue cardstock and used it for a journal. Again, I used the same brown ink chalk to chalk all the edges. I wrote my journal and punched a small hole on the top of the journal and secured it with a small bronze brad as decoration.





I purchased a wave design from Silhouette. I decided to cut the waves in 2 colors - white and blue.

I added the seashells onto my page as embellishments. I used Jolee's Boutique.



If I were to fix this layout, I would add a frame around the picture.

Lycee Agricole d' Opunohu

In Moorea, there is a agriculture school. The surrounding was beautiful, so green. We saw a lot of pineapples growing on the ground (Moorea is known to be the "Pineapple Island" after all), papaya trees, passion fruit trees, lime trees, and many more!

There, we were able to sample some of the jams that were made there. They tasted so good that we decided to buy some jams to take them home to enjoy. The day was pretty hot, so we decided to order a fruit juice to quench our thirst. After they made it, it looked really pretty in the glass. It was a two toned color- from orange to yellow. I regretted not buying a bag of vanilla beans. The vanilla beans had a very strong aroma. Our tour guide told us that if we put a strand of vanilla bean in a bottle of vodka and leave it there for a while, when you open the bottle of vodka, you will only be able to smell and taste vanilla, and not the alcohol. (Note: please don't take my advice for it. I only wrote what my tour guide told us. I didn't purchase any vanilla beans to experiment if it was true.)

I like to also point out that the time we were in Moorea, this place was giving us a better exchange rate compared to the bank. During the time we went, the bank gave us $1USD to about 80 CPF. However, at the school, they were giving us $1USD to 100 CPF. It had been about couple years since we were there. The exchange rate might had already changed. For those that are planning to travel to Moorea, I suggest not to exchange all your cash all at once in the bank at the airport. Save some cash, you may find better exchange rates from local stores.

I decided to do a double layout for this page. I used green and brown cardstock as background. I cut two 2-inch white strips to put across the top of the two pages. I cut out fonts from my digital cutter. I also added a dark green with white polka dots ribbon.



I kept this double layout really simple. I decided to choose the school name as the title for the pages. We took many different pictures.

I decided to keep the sizes of each picture uniformed. I had to cut down each picture to fit all 8 pictures on the layout.

This is the last layout for the 4x4 Safari Tour. I only took the highlights of the tour to put into my scrapbook. Our tour included a stop at the Pineapple Factory and Fruit Juice Distillery. We were able to sample some liquors and juice there. At the end of the trip, our tour guide took us to the pearl shop to shop for pearls.

It was a 4-5 hours trip. By the time when we finished the tour, most of the people in my group decided to stop by to nearby market, no more than 5 minutes walk from our hotel, to pick up some food or snacks. I forgot what we had, but I believed we bought ourselves a jambon baguette, and picked up a carton of pineapple juice to bring back to our room to enjoy lunch on our balcony.

Next time, a fancy dinner in the hotel. I was inspired by a scrapbook layout that I saw at a local scrapbook store, and decided to scrap-lift the page.

Pao Pao

Pao Pao is a small village in Moorea. It was our first stop of the Safari Tour. The tour guide drove off the main road to go to Pao Pao. He also gave a bit of history about the island, and talked about the volcano and crater. We saw pineapples grew along the road. (I love their Moorea pineapples and their pineapple juice!)

I decided to do a double layout. I chose to use the Citrus stack from DCWV. When I buy papers, if there is a matching paper stack with the cardstock, I would buy them both at the same time. That way, I don't have to frustrate myself with complimenting the colors.

I printed out letters from my silhouette digital cutter. I used a green pattern cardstock as background. The white flower patterns were in glitters! I decided to round the center picture with the corner punch.

For some odd reason, when I worked with cardstocks with glitters, my photo tape would not adhere to the back. It kept on falling off. I had to use runner tape to tape the corners.

Because the page was so bright with the lime green, that completely overpowered my letters. I thought about using another color to put behind the white letters to make it stand out. I decided not to.

One the other side of the layout, I kept the page really simple. I purchased a flower design from the digital cutter's website.

This was my first time cutting out a design which I needed to use more than one color to complete a design. I had to also do a little layering to create the flower. I kept the flower white to compliment the layout on the left.

I cut out a small frame with my digital cutter to give an illusion of a "journal" tag. I used stickers to spell out "Pao Pao" and wrote a few small facts about the village. I have a problem writing straight. It tends to move upward from left to right! I did eventually invest in an invisible ink pen to help me "eye" my lines to keep my work straight.

I was a bit disappointed me this page. This was one of the pages that I did went back and added more elements to make the page look better. Watch out for the post in the future!

Tiki Village Theatre

Our first activity in Moorea was visiting the Tiki Village Theatre. Before flying to Tahiti, we had it planned out where we were going to go in Moorea. I told Tommy that I wanted to visit the cultural center during the day time and returning back to the village for their Polynesian buffet dinner and dance show in the evening. We scheduled with the cultural center to pick us up from our hotel. The driver was one of the nicest girl I had met in Moorea, but I had forgotten her name! They gave us a tour of the center, showed us the arts and crafts that they made and we even sat in an outrigger to see the pearl farm demonstration!

I kept my layout simple. I used brown cardstock as background and used red cardstock to cut out letters and borders. The most difficult part was putting the "Polynesian Buffet & Dance" letters onto the page. The fonts were small and I had to manually pull out each strip of tape to put it on the back of the letter. That was really tedious work! I think this was the page where I told myself, "no more small letters because I am going to break my back and my eyes will go bad!"
It was my first time to cut out a border from my digital cutter. It was so quick and easy! I couldn't have done this kind of intricate cutting with a pair of scissor! With that border, it gave an instant feel of being in a tropical island!

The right side of my double layout, I decided to put different pictures we took at the cultural center.

My intention of this page was to create a pocket and put the dinner & show program that I collected inside. The downside of this was not being able to pull it out because I didn't come up with a solution on how to access that map easily! On top of the pocket, I decided to journal about our adventure at the Tiki Village Theatre.

Enjoy!

Descanso Gardens

During Thanksgiving day in 2008, we spent couple hours at Descanso Gardens before Tommy went home to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family, while I spent my Thanksgiving at my aunt's house. I have to say, it gets pretty frustrating when it comes to Thanksgiving every year. I like Tommy to attend my family's Thanksgiving and every year, he refuses. I suggested to him one year that we should attend both dinners - hang out at one house for a little while and run off to the other one, he still refuses! I guess his perfect excuse which he never dare say in front of my face is, "we are not married yet, so I am not attending to your family's Thanksgiving!"

Because both of us didn't have to do any food preparation (not like any one would trust me in the kitchen with a big bird anyway), we decided to take a small outing to Descanso Gardens. I always wanted to check out this garden. It is located at La Canada Flintridge. There were a lot to see, but so little time. I wished I had more time and hope to return some day!

I decided to do a double layout for this page. The left side of the layout, I decided to put pictures of us and the right side of the layout, I put pictures of the surroundings around the garden. Again, I kept the page simple and didn't do alot of paper layering. I used one of the Fall Stacks by DCWV. There's some pattern on it if you look closely to the picture. I rounded the corners of the pictures with a corner punch. (The rounded corner punch is one of the best investments I have ever purchased for scrapbooking!)

I used my silhouette digital cutter to cut out the fonts. Instead of using plain paper, I decided to cut the fonts with a pattern paper to create some design on the letters to give a different look to the fonts.

I also used the matching pattern paper as a background for journaling. I used a tiny hole puncher to punch the white and pattern paper and added a green brad to it. I then adhered the journal to the cardstock.

For the second page, the layout on the right side, I incorporated different scenery pictures taken at the garden. I kept the page simple, and only added a strip of the same green pattern paper on the side. There were so many pictures, I didn't know how to layer papers and put pictures over it, and yet not to make the page looking busy. I also made small tags. On there, I wrote the name of the gardens or places we visited there.

I love how the green pattern paper matches the entire layout. It made the page not so boring. If I were to fix this page, I like to layer a some pattern papers to the layout. I would not use blue ink to write out the garden names. I would use black instead to make the entire page "flow."

This is the last random layout that I had done in the last year and a half. Since August 2009, I have been working on my vacation pictures to create my travel albums. My passion is travel and scrapbook. They just complement each other very well. You see the world with your eyes, capture your memories with a camera and transfer everything you remembered in a scrapbook to tell a story. That's what life is about! :)

Wine Tasting @ Santa Ynez Valley

Santa Ynez was my first wine tasting trip with Tommy. Believe it or not, after this trip, we fell in love of doing wine tasting tours and had to go to Napa Valley a month after. After we left Ojai, we drove up to Santa Ynez Valley for wine tasting. We watched the movie, "Sideways," and we picked two wineries off their list to visit.

This was a simple layout. I used only one sheet of cardstock as the background. I chose brown as the background because of the pictures in the background. Not only that, we went to visit in September, the beginning of Fall season. I wanted to use "earthy" tones for my layout.

I cut out fonts from my Silhouette cutter. Some of the fonts were smaller and they were difficult to put on the page because I didn't have the right tools to adhere them. When it comes to scrapbooking, I don't like to use glue unless it is absolutely necessary. I use runner tapes to tape everything down on the page. Not until I was 1/3 way into working on my first travel album, I decided to pick up the Xyron X to make my life easier.

For the smaller fonts, I had to pick out tiny stripes off the runner tapes and add the tapes to the font one by one by hand. I had to carefully place the tapes on each letter and had to make sure the tapes were not showing on the edges of each font.

The problem about this page was the printout of the wine map. I tri-folded the map, added a ribbon to wrap around the map, and taped the back of map to the layout. If the page doesn't have a protector cover, this would work. However, all my albums have protector covers for each sheet. I will have to cut a hole on the protector cover so I can access the map. When I have time, I will put try to figure out what to do.

As for embellishment, I decided to use rub-on to keep the page simple. The great thing about rub-ons is how simple it is to transfer designs to the project. All I need is a popsicle stick and continue to rub the design off the sheet. If done correctly, the entire design gets transferred to the project!

If I were to fix this layout, I would add frames to the pictures and round the corners with the corner punch. I would probably shrink the map to keep the entire map flat on the layout without the need to fold and write out the places we went on a tag.

Happy Monday!

Napa Valley

My first weekend trip with Tommy, and we decided to take a road trip up to San Francisco and Napa Valley. We took my dad's BMW (which I paid lease on, and besides, his car was way under mileage! Totally took advantage of it.) We drove to San Francisco on Friday night and didn't arrive there until past midnight. We woke up early on Saturday morning to head to Napa Valley for our wine tasting adventure for the day. I am not going to be blogging about my wine tasting adventure in this blog. I will eventually blog about it in my travel blog, if I ever get to it.

We picked out 4 wineries we wanted to visit, but during our adventure, we took some advices from local wineries to visit some "must-visit" places. We ended up with 5 wineries for wine tastings, 1 winery for lunch, 1 winery for picture perfect view (winery closed by the time we got there!) and 1 winery that we couldn't tour because their tour was fully booked. We visited a total of 8 wineries!



I decided to do a double layout to showcase the wineries we went to. I decided to use a orange background because we went to Napa in October. Orange color reminds me of Fall season. I drew dotted lines on the layout to represent how we toured Napa Valley. I used a journal tag to list out the wineries we went to by order. I used Jolee's dimensional stickers as my embellishments for my layout.

What I like about this layout is the color. Everything seemed to match really well. I really like how I position each picture. It gave a playful, uplifting feel to the layout. I tried to do some stamping and embossing, unfortunately, it failed because I didn't have the right tool at that moment to emboss. I eventually gave up on the idea of stamping and embossing on this layout. Nonetheless, this page became one of my favorite.

Have a great weekend! :)

Happy Birthday Tommy!

This was my first layout created as a gift. It took many hours to complete this page. I had to cut everything out by hand. Every year, when I present the wrapped gift to Tommy, before he even unwrap his present, he knew exactly what I got for him. Well, he couldn't figure out what I had gotten for him that year. I caught him by surprise.

The title was very generic, "Happy Birthday Tommy!" I just didn't know exactly what to put as a title. The layout would look kind of empty if I didn't add a title to it. I took most of the time cutting out all the letters by hand. I had to do them twice. I had to print the letters in black and I also printed the letters on a blue cardstock paper. I probably took more than 6 hours cutting out the letters. I also added glitters to the blue letters as well to add a bit of sparkle.

Oops, how did I turn my page sideway to take this picture?

The second hardest part of this layout was the cutting of the swirl. I printed different swirl sizes to see which one would look the best before cutting it out. I printed the swirl on a white cardstock and used scribble paint to trace over the swirl. I added white glitters to the wet paint. When the paint dried up, the design would add a little bit of dimension, as well as some sparkle to the page. After the paint was fully dry, I used a knife to cut the swirl out. I had to be extra careful when I was cutting the swirl out. The most difficult part was cutting out the inside of the leaves.

I decided to do something different and created a double frame to the layout. Since it was my first time doing it, I had to create the frames several times to perfect what I wanted to look like. Because the frame was the focus of the page, I spent some time to do the measurement.

I added a small personal note to the page. It was like a birthday card/ scrapbook page/ birthday gift mixed into one.

Finished product, along with the frame

If I could fix the layout, I would move the letters lower because the letters were too close to the top of the frame. I didn't take the frame into account when I was putting this page together. The letters seemed to be positioned well without the frame. Once the frame was added, the top had been cut off.

With such hardwork, it surely paid off for my Christmas gift that year. Tommy had gotten me one of the most thoughtful gift I could ever imagine, the Silhouette Digital Cutter! :) Yay to no more cutting letters and delicate things with a pair of scissor! Yay to time saving! Yay to create more pages!